Introduction

VIA and AMD have formed
an extremely strong relationship over the past few years. Dating back to VIA’s
strong support for the Socket-7 and later the Super7 markets, VIA has been a
tremendous help in recent times as well. With no intentions of becoming a chipset
manufacturer, nor the resources to do so in addition to maintaining a successful
processor line, AMD has devoted their attention, rightfully so, to producing
the Athlon. Instead, AMD relied on third party chipset manufacturers like ALi,
SiS and VIA to develop the platforms for AMD’s processors. While ALi and
SiS were pretty much no-shows for the Athlon platform until now, VIA essentially
carried the Slot-A and Socket-A markets with their KX133 and KT133 chipsets.

This could have been a dangerous
situation for AMD, because no matter how good their chips are, without a reliable
platform to run on their processors are useless. It turns out that VIA’s chipsets
were a definite success, allowing the Athlon to gain over 20% of the desktop
retail market share.

At the beginning of this
month, AMD released their 760 chipset, where
they introduced the DDR technology to the Athlon. This is definitely good news,
as we have seen that this new chipset does provide higher memory bandwidth,
and thus higher performance. However, in spite of the release of the AMD 760
together with the upcoming DDR chipsets from VIA and ALi, there are still some
questions that remain unanswered. When can DDR motherboards be widely available
to the public? What will be the average cost of those boards? Will DDR SDRAM
be able to live up with the demand? And most importantly, is it worth it to
current SDRAM owners to do a complete upgrade, possibly even throwing out a
large chunk of memory in order to get the 10% performance gain of DDR SDRAM?

With DDR
here, but not readily available yet, VIA’s KT133 chipset is still the platform
of choice if not the only platform that is available in many cases. Since its
release back in June, we have seen a constant flow of KT133 based boards from
motherboard manufacturers.

Back in August, we were
able to pull together ten KT133 motherboards and made provided
you all with a complete roundup of the cream of the crop at that time.
Being the first wave of KT133 motherboards, the boards were more or less average.
Only a few candidates were able to differentiate themselves from the competition;
and for the end user, it was really not that hard to pick a motherboard of choice
during that time. The ABIT KT7-RAID and the ASUS A7V easily won the comparison
and became the top two boards in the market. They offered outstanding performance
and stability, but it was the ability to change the multiplier ratio of the
processors that gave them the gold.

Fast forwarding three months
to the present, manufacturers not only have more experience with the chipset
but are now more familiar with what features really sell. The method to implement
clock multiplier control is no longer a secret,the VIA 686B Super South Bridge is finally out boasting Ultra ATA 100 support,
and on-board IDE RAID controllers have become much more common. All these factors,
together with subtle design adjustments are enough to differentiate these, the
second wave of KT133 motherboards, from their elders.